Region | Lebanon
Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 4
Gulf News reporter Abbas Al Lawati is attending a workshop in Geneva entitled Beyond Wars, Building Peace which is organised by the Swiss press agency InfoSud and the Media21 journalist’s network in coordination with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
- By Abbas Al Lawati, Staff Reporter
- Published: 14:29 April 7, 2008
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Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 3
Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 3
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Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 2
Gulf News reporter blogs from a trip on how to rebuild peace after a war
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Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 1
Rebuilding Peace blog: Day 1
Gulf News reporter Abbas Al Lawati is attending a workshop in Geneva entitled Beyond Wars, Building Peace which is organised by the Swiss press agency InfoSud and the Media21 journalist's network in coordination with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
Following a five day workshop, Abbas and eleven other reporters from around the world will go on a five day field trip to to witness the reconstruction efforts after the war with last year.
April 3, 2008
Iraq has four to six million internally displaced persons (IDPs). That's more than the amount of refugees the war there has created.
That fact is worrying because while the refugees' rights are protected under the 1951 Geneva Convention, the IDPs are not protected under any such treaty, and there is no international organisation that works primarily to assist them.
While recognising the gravity of the IDP situation in Iraq, Dr Khassim Diagne, senior policy advisor for IDPs at the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), says that new agencies and conventions are not the answer for the problem just yet.
“We have asked the representative of the secretary general Walter Kälin whether a new convention is necessary, but a convention like that would take a very long time to agree on,'' he said.
The UNHCR would instead prefer to have guiding principles from the UN to be transformed into legislation on the national level, “which is better than having a convention that is continuously violated''.
I asked Dr Kiagne what solutions the UNHCR would recommend for Iraq's IDP problem. Would the agency like to see Iraqi IDPs return to their former homes or was it willing to accept their current “temporary'' locations as Iraq's new demographic reality? Although scenarios of resettlement are discussed at the UNHCR, it is not the agency's place to recommend one solution or the other, he said. “That decision belongs to the individual IDPs''.
But the violence continues and millions of Iraqis remain in a state of limbo. If no action is taken in returning or resettling them soon, could they suffer the fate of Palestinian refugees, who have had no place to call home for the past sixty years?
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